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Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

The birth rate correlates inversely with female earnings growth and correspondingly with male earnings growth; or, more to the point, declining birth rates correlates with the advancement of feminism (including birth rates approaching and then reaching zero.)

This is an observation and not a judgement. Take what you will with this information.

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Yes, because of the outdated assumption that women take virtually all responsibility for childcare, which is damaging not just to women, but to men and children too, combined with the it becoming more difficult for families to manage on a single income.

It is not just an American problem. It is slowly changing, at least here in the UK: I see a lot more dads taking kids around these days. I have still found people were surprised that my daughter lived with me rather than her mother after divorce though.

It makes sense to me. When women have more choices, they tend to put off having kids or they raise their standards - for their economic situation before kids, for partners, etc.

I think this is good; insofar as women have children, it should be because they want to, not because they're pushed into it.

I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.

Slightly fewer is good. A rate of around 1.8 kids per woman seems slow but it's an exponential so it's still quite significant.

Parts of the world have reached 1.0 kids per woman, which is a halving of the population per generation, which will put a massive strain on our resources

> which will put a massive strain on our resources

True, but again, scientists are saying that we're already putting massive strain on our ecological resources, and the strain is only increasing. Not just climate change, but ocean acidification, modification of biogeochemical balances, habitat destruction, etc.

We are at genuine risk of accidentally wrecking the ecosystems we depend on.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

Population degrowth may do more harm than good. One billionaire with a private jet does more harm than thousands.

Can you expand on the harm of degrowth? I usually see it framed in terms of "our state retirement system is an obvious pyramid scheme that is about to collapse, we need to keep the scam going as long as we can". Are there better reasons to worry?

> I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.

If you believed this, would you be against sterilizing third world populations to limit the overall population growth ( given those are the populations which continue to grow in this environment ) ? If not sterilizing - what about propagandizing their younger population to not reproduce? Would that be a net-good?

If not, why not?

Their populations will follow the same pattern with increased education.

"X is bad" is obviously not a license to commit genocide to lessen the effects of X.

Easy, very affordable access to birth control (both information and actual physical stuff) for all humans is a very good idea.

> If you believed this, would you be against sterilizing third world populations to limit the overall population growth ( given those are the populations which continue to grow in this environment ) ?

...wow.

Is this a serious question?

This is true, although I think it correlates more strongly with female participation in the workforce than earnings directly. And it's not a criticism of feminism, just a consequence that we should be aware of.

A material component of reduction in the US fertility rate has been avoided teen (15-19 cohort) pregnancies. ~40% of pregnancies both in the US and internationally, annually, are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively).

Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says - https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate... - April 9th, 2026

Additional citation:

There's No Mystery To America's Fertility Decline - https://ifstudies.org/blog/theres-no-mystery-to-americas-fer... - June 30th, 2026 (“The U.S. fertility decline is shaped by many forces, but the data point to one primary driver: the collapse of childbearing among women in their 20s.”)

> This is an observation and not a judgement. Take what you will with this information.

Why bring it up at all if you're not trying to say anything?

Birth rate correlates with home ownership rate for people aged 25-34. Wonder why that's been going down despite household earnings growth.

It also correlates with the economy being more and more hostile towards single income households, but let's just blame women knowing their own worth.

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